"Over the past months she has dwindled in size and spirit, alive but distances from life. Her gaze falls just short of its goal. I look at her now and she looks lost, as if she doesn't know where she is, or who she is. Our life has changed so much since Father came home to die. The process of his dying has killed us all a little bit." (Pp. 14)
"If it seems like he's going to die she'll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they are going to end." (Pp. 14)
"It was something more than either of these things, but what, I couldn't say. It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration: getting there, wherever it was, wasn't the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never-ending." (Pp. 15)
"The magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence." (Pp. 17)
"Well, laughter is the best medicine, he says though neither of us is laughing. Neither of us even smiles. He just looks at me with deepening sadness, the way it happens sometimes with him, going from one emotion to another the way some people channel surf." (Pp. 18)
"I'd say I'd missed you, I say, if I knew what I was missing." (Pp. 21)
"He ran through the darkness until it became light again, and the world turned green and wonderful." (Pp. 48)
"There's both sadness and relief in the way the tension leaves our bodies, and we look at each other, sharing that look, that once-in-a-lifetime look." (Pp. 65)
"Though Dr. Benett had given him a year to live about a year ago, he has been dying so long than in a way I just expect him to keep on dying forever." (Pp. 66)
"Dying, he has that look dying people get in their eyes sometimes, happy and sad, tired and spiritually blessed, all at the same time." (Pp. 67)
"And so we're stuck here, smiles on our faces like a couple of idiots. What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?" (Pp. 69)
"I stop myself. There's an unspoken rule in my family that it's best not to talk religion or politics with my father. When the subject is religion he won't talk at all, and when it's politics he won't stop talking. The truth is, most things are hard to talk about with him. By that I mean the essence of things, the important things, the things that matter." (Pp. 70)
"The central air hums on, billowing the shades open at the bottom. Light streams in past the blinds, dust motes swimming. The room has a faint stench to it, which I thought I'd gotten used to, but haven't. It always makes me sick to my stomach and I feel it coming on strong now. It's either that or the shock to my system of having learned more about my father in the last few seconds than I have in the lifetime that preceded them." (Pp. 74)
"-Thanks, he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he's heard what he's come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go." (Pp. 74)
"A kind of fraternity of wishful thinking and broken hearts." (Pp. 77)
"The sun beat down on my father and my father's yard with an intensity recalling an earlier time when the sun was hotter, the way everything in the world used to be hotter or bigger or better or simpler than things were right about now." (Pp. 117)
"He'd expected more, of course, from my arrival. A muted brilliance, a glow, maybe even a halo of some kind. That mystical feeling of completion. But none of that came. I was just a baby, like any other- except, of course, that I belonged to him, and that made me special." (Pp. 120)
"Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love. Being alone was lonely, but there was an even grater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him." (Pp. 123)
"He told me this again and again. as if he knew something might happen, that he might be forced to save my life one day." (Pp. 125)
"Suddenly I felt my father near me; it was as though we were flying, too, and that we were both falling together. His arms embraced me like a cloak, and I came to rest on the ground beside him. He had plucked me from Heaven and set me down safely on Earth." (Pp. 127)
"He stared at me for a long moment, and he winked, the wink meaning any goddamn thing I wanted it to mean." (Pp. 128)
"But he liked to leave me laughing. This is how he wanted to remember me, and how he wanted to be remembered." (Pp.130)
"Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a part of him, of who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?" (Pp. 139)
"How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can't realize what is already here, outside the car window? My father remembers when there were no cars at all. He remembers when people used to walk. And he does, too- walk, that is- but he still loves the feeling of an engine rumbling, wheels rolling, the display of life framed in the window in front and back and on all sides. The car is my father's magic carpet." (Pp. 144)
"How to get there, how the road seems to end where it doesn't, and how the lake seems to be where it isn't, and how hard it would be for anybody to think to find this strange place." (Pp. 151)
"In three inches of swamp water is more stagnant life than an ocean could hold; at its edge, where the muck hardens and warms, life itself begins." (Pp. 151)
"So many years began to pass in just this fashion, and his presence there becomes so ordinary and predictable that eventually it isn't as though he has never left, but as though he had never come in the first place." (Pp. 158)
" Because today was the day they would know and she hadn't wanted to think about it, hadn't wanted to sit there thinking of nothing else but what she might learn today." (Pp. 165)
"This wasn't life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashined to take the place of Purgatory. I could see how many breaths he was taking by looking at the monitor. I could see what his frenetic heart was up to. And there were a couple of wavy lines and numbers I wasn't sure about at all, but I kept an eye on them as well. In fact, after a while it was the machines I was looking at, not my father at all. They had become him. They were telling me his story." (Pp. 171)
"There's no time for hellos and how are yours and we both know it." (Pp. 173)
"And he says it in this real shaky voice so I know, don't ask me how but I know that, machines or not, this will be the last time I ever see him alive. Tomorrow, he'll be dead." (Pp. 173)
"I look into his gray-blue dying eyes. We're staring at each other, showing each other our last looks, the faces we'll take with us into eternity, and I'm thinking how I wish I knew him better, how I wish we'd had a life together, wishing my father wasn't such a complete and utter goddamn mystery to me." (Pp. 174)
"All of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, immposible to hold on to even if I'd wanted to, and I wanted to." (Pp. 180)
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